Gogol, the great Russian novelist, masturbated; to which practice was due, probably, the dreamy melancholy of his life-pictures; and Goethe is supposed to have been a victim of the same vice, from the passage in the seventh book of his "Dichtung und Wahrheit," where, describing his student life at Leipzig, and the loss with amorous and attractive men. Delectalio morosa, as the theologians called it, occupying the mind with sexual dreams, and images, was in the early church the besetting sin of the neophyte in the convent, as well as the postulant for the priesthood. A perpetuation, doubtless, of the ancient myth of the incubi and succubm, male and female nocturnal demons which were supposed to consort sexually with men and women in sleep," and which Gamier supposes to have blossomed out into the ecclesiastical pederasty of mediaeval Italy, the day-dream, or sexual reverie, was an institution well calculated to find ready acceptance, and full development, among a vast number of hot-blooded youths, of both sexes, shut out from one another's society, and condemned to seek the sole gratification of their sexual passions in psychological forms; so that it is not wonderful, notwithstanding the seemingly unsatisfactory nature of the act, to find a writer of the times saying that "not an abbey of any celebrity could be found in which the cloistered customs did not, on numerous occasions, suffer from the contagion of ahamelessness."1

1 Concerning this point there seems to be a practical agreement among all observers. Tissot stated that masturbation causes aversion to marriage. Loiman found that the habit in women renders normal sexual satisfaction impossible (Ueber Onanùtmu* brim tVribe), and Smith Baker remarks that " a source of marital aversion lies in the fact that substitution of mechanical and iniquitous excitation affords more satisfaction than legitimate intercourse does." (Jour. AW. and Meni. Di»., 1892.)

Day-dreaming has been very interestingly studied, in the shape of the continued story, by Mabel Learoyd, of Wellesley College—an institution at which, by the way, only recently, an incipient rebellion was started by the refusal of one of the faculty to continue his lectures on procreation to the young ladies;1 and in most cases where refined romanticism is carried to the very greatest height it will be found to have a strictly sexual basis." *